This French engraving (I've cropped this from the whole image) is of a 1858 regatta on the Seine at Saint-Cloud. It is the oldest pictorial rendering I've come across of a full-on racing "Le Clipper Parisien", which was developed from an imported American sandbagger, and refined for racing on the rivers around Paris . This is the fleet of the larger racing sailboats (they split the fleet around a 5.66 meter length) and shows the Clipper with a good lead.
More information can be found at this website.
Here is a profile drawing of an 1887 clipper.
This image of the engraving was found by French historian, Louis Pillon, who published a book last year on the early history of yachting in France, La Voile dans les boucles de La Marne
(TOH to Tom Price who was the first to spot the image on the Net.)
4 comments:
is Sandbagger a reference to weight added in sand bags for ballast?
Yes, they would stack sandbags on the weather side and then have to move them during a tack. I think the sandbags were mostly deployed for the high stakes racing off New York City Harbor. I haven't seen any reference to the French using them on their river-racing Clippers. The Sandbagger hull shape was also used in some catboat classes that were raced around Long Island Sound in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century. Again I'm not sure if they used sandbags.
that sounds dreadful - how'd you like to be the guy(s) that just hangs out in the bottom of the boat, moving sandbags back and forth as they tack upwind?!
Je ne comprends pas pourquoi vous nommez "Sandbagger" des bateaux qui ne portent aucun sac de sable ! Certainement les "Clippers" parisiens ont quelques points communs avec les sandbaggers, mais c'est justement avec la bonne dénomination que nous pouvons les différencier.
I do not understand why you name "Sandbagger" boats that carry no bag of sand! Certainly the Parisian "Clippers" have some points in common with the sandbaggers, but it is precisely with the right denomination that we can differentiate them.
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